Dear Straight Black Men, Welcome to the Kyriarchy!

Just as those of Asian ethnicities have become the new “Whites” (with all the attendant “White Privilege”), now it seems that Straight Black Men have become the “White People of Black People“…

“It feels counterintuitive to suggest that straight black men as a whole possess any sort of privilege—particularly the type of privilege created for and protected by whiteness. In America, we are near or at the bottom in every relevant metric determining quality of life. Our arrest and incarceration rates, our likelihood of dying a violent death, our likelihood of graduating high school and attending college, our employment rates, our average net worth, our likelihood of surviving past 70—I could continue, but the point is clear.

“But assessing our privilege (or lack thereof) on these facts considers only our relationship with whiteness and with America. Intraracially, however, our relationship to and with black women is not unlike whiteness’s relationship to us. In fact, it’s eerily similar.

“…

“Either way, that statement, that phrasing and what they suggest are shocking and succinct: simple, subtle and fucking scary.

“And it’s true.”

In other words: Welcome to the Kyriarchy, all you straight Black men!

Thus, if those of Asian ethnicities are the “new Whites“, then straight Black men are the “new new Whites”.

“‘White’ has stopped meaning Caucasian, imprecise as this term has always been, and has started to mean ‘those racial groups that have made it.’ ‘Minority’ has started to mean ‘those racial groups that have not yet made it.’ (A recent San Francisco Chronicle story even excludes non-Mexican-American Latinos from the ‘minority’ category.) This new division is as likely as the old to create nasty, corrosive, sometimes fatal battles over which racial groups get the spoils. So long as we think in terms of ‘white’ and ‘minority,’ we risk disaster, no matter which races are put in which box.”